Battle Room 100: An in-depth look into the Zero G game from Ender’s Game

Hello. This is a Korean in America.
If you have read my review of the movie “Ender’s Game”, you would know my
thoughts about the movie. It sucks! It is so bad that I had a difficult time
not leaving the theater. However, as a not so professional critic, I stayed
until the end of the movie. One of the key things that I thought the movie criminally
glossed over was the Battle Room stories. For the following articles, I will
examine the Battle Room in detail.

Introduction to Battle
Room 100

While the
movie only spends about the 15 minutes on the Battle Room and Zero G combat
games, it is really the heart of the story and takes up more than 40% of the
novel. The movie treats the battle room as a fancy paint ball game that kids
play for fun. It is essentially equivalent to the “Quidditch games” in the
Harry Potter series. However, the degree of importance is different between the
two.

In the Harry
Potter series, “Quidditch” is just a game played in the school that does not
specialize in creating “Quidditch” players. In the novel, Ender’s Game, what
happens in the battle room is the point of the school. It is not a game but a space
ship combat simulation even though it is presented as “Space” infantry combat
to the students and the readers. Everything in the battle room is essentially preparation
for later parts of the novel when Ender is dealing with space ships. This
should be evident from the fact that the Battle school’s mandate is to create
Space ship flag officers.

No one from battle school sinks so
low to enter the Marines or infantry even if they are Space-y.

The darkness of the
Battle Room and space

THE famous
quote from the book which was put on the poster of the terrible movie was

“The enemy’s gate is down”

This quote
is about resetting one’s Z-axis in Zero G. Ender recognized that the cadets had
a tendency to use the station’s artificial gravity as a reference point in the
battle room where it is no longer useful since there is no gravity. This means
that one has to constantly reference how the station’s artificial gravity was
oriented purely via memory.

Not only is
this difficult in general, doing it during combat is extremely problematic as
it constrains maneuverability. You keep using your brain’s computation
resources in trying to identify one’s Z axis.

2D Spatial awareness

The common
description of two dimensional spatial awareness, is thinking in terms of only
X and Y axises. The positive X-axis is usually one’s front direction. In other
words, it is the direction indicated by one’s visual sense. Identifying it
requires a minimum amount of your brain’s computation resources.

The positive
Y-axis requires additional computation resources since it uses one’s positive X-axis
is as a reference point. It is the direction where your vision barely reaches
while not being your back. Even after that is processed, you have to decide
which side is your positive Y-axis since you have two options. This is usually
determined via which hand is dominant. Since the majority of the population is
right hand dominant, the right side becomes the positive Y-axis.

Learning to set your Z
axis.

The underlining
fact of two dimensional spatial awareness is that the Z-axis is a fixed direction
rather than a relative direction like the others. This is because the negative Z-axis
is determined by direction of gravity which is the center of the earth. If you
are on the surface of the earth, the negative Z-axis is a fixed direction of
your legs while standing. So, identifying it requires the least amount of computation
resources. It helps also that you commonly don’t use the Z-axis much in daily
life if you’re lucky.

This is
quite convenient since the other two directions use the Z axis as a reference
point. The X and Y axises are determined in relation to the fixed Z-axis.

In Zero G,
there is no gravity. This means two things. First, you have an
additional axis that requires as much or even more computational resource as
the identifying one’s Y axis. Second,
you no longer have a fixed direction to use as a reference point. You only have
3 relative directions and more computational resource requirements than most
can handle.

Why Down?

In the
battle room, there is only two fixed points recognizable in the darkness. Those
are both teams’ gates. Thus, using the enemy’s gate as a reference is obvious according
to the objective focused military mindset.

However, have you wondered why it is
down and not, let’s say, front or up?

This is
where things get more complicated.

You have 3
relative directions in Zero G. Among them, the positive X- axis is the easiest
to set since it is the direction indicated by one’s visual sense. In other
words, it is the direction of your eyes. However, there is another factor that
needs to be considered. It is the direction of motion in the battle room.

Motion, at least
controlled motion, in the battle room is generated via the thrust generated by
either arms or legs pushing off the walls. Uncontrolled motion generating by crashing
off walls are a different story. So, the direction of motion tends to be along
the vertical line of the body depending on which body part does the pushing off.

If you have
the enemy’s gate as a reference point for the positive X- axis, front, this
means that this direction of motion is added as a separate factor to compute.
It requires translating the X- axis information into direction of motion information
and thus increases the computational resource requirements.

On the
other hand, when you equate your Z-axis with the direction of motion, you have
less to consider. “The
enemy’s gate is down”
basically means that the enemy’s gate is the direction of motion. The down part
means the direction of your feet. However, why down and not up?

There are few
reasons for this.First, we, as humans, are more used to looking down to our
feet than up. Seeing superheroes flying around looking at the direction of flight,
have you never felt like it looks weird? Second,
as the command center, you should not expose your head towards the enemy. In
the Battle room, partially frozen legs are actually a good thing seeing for
Ender use of it as a shield. Third, you have a better firing arc
when your eyes are behind the aiming arms than when your eyes are is front.

A human body as a
Spaceship.

So, what
does this image of a cadet flying in dark space conjure up? You have a long rectangular
body aimed at the target with the head at the back looking forwards aiming the
firing arm in front of it. It is
basically the shape of what we would consider a traditional Spaceship design inspired
by conventional battleship designs.

Conclusion

What Ender
recognized, while not really stating it out laud, was that the cadets in the
battle room were placeholders for spaceships. However, the other cadets were
viewing it according to an infantry perspective. So, Ender exploited this
weakness which was one of the points of the Battle room.

To create Space ship flag officers.

This is why
Ender is a genius! The movie does not show you anything of this. It is not a place to make friends or find love.

Thanks you
for reading this article. I will go over the individual battles in the
following articles starting with Battle Room 101.